Maxtor Ultra ata/133 controller, FreeBSD 4.[5,8], and the boot process

[Charles Peterman]

As it turns out, the latest rev of the Intel SDS2 motherboard also rev's its 
ICH4 ide controller, turning it into a useless piece of PIO crap and 
destroying my systems' performance and sucking down my weekend.

After contacting Soren Schmidt concerning the state of the ata driver and 
whether a quick hack would be appropriate, I decided to venture into using 
a PCI add-on card controller, in this case the Maxtor Ultra ata/133 
controller.  There is only one disk aside from the 3ware raid, which does not 
show up as an ata device.

The install CD for 4.5 installs to this drive without a problem, but it tells 
me that the loan disk is at ad4.  Upon reboot, the boot loader fails, 
horribly, no loader found.  Rebooting with the install CD, and going into the 
loader's command line, I find that my disk is listed as disk2s1, and not the 
disk4 I thought it would be. 

Is there a variable I could set during boot to get the disk to show up as ad0?  
SImilar to the way removing ATA_STATIC_ID from the kernel compile does.

Various attempts to massage loader.conf and the currdev, loaddev, or bootdev
variables failed to produce results.   I attempted to set these to disk2s1a 
with no results.

If someone could point me in the right direction for how to handle this, I 
would be much obliged.  An RTFM (with pointer to M) or a helping hand would 
be sincerely appreciated.

Thanks, 

Charles